Office365 DirSync Error

After using dirsync for a few months now in order to sync the on premises Active Directory with the Windows Azure Active Directory for our company's Office 365 subscription, I got a very strange error today.

A user reported that she could not log in to her mailbox via Micosoft Outlook so the first thing I did was to check the ForeFront Synchronization Service Manager logs to see if there is something wrong with the password sync process.

On the Windows Azure Active Directory Connector there was the message "stopped-extension-dll-exception". The first thing that came to my mind was, OK some update broke the whole thing.

I decided to take a look at the Application log in case there's something there that could help, and it was.

There were several events stating that there is a error connecting to the authentication service. I searched the web for a bit and there were some people that suggested to check the Azure account used for the process for expired password.

I remembered that I had changed the password policy for that account for the same reason but I double checked and everything was fine.

Then I decided to check the network so I restarted all the DNS services on DNS servers and also flushed the DNS cache on all DNS servers and the server hosting the dirsync tool.

After that I check the firewall rules so the traffic from the dirsync server is not blocked.

I logged back in the dirsync server and run the dirsync configuration wizard. Everything worked fine this time.

So before uninstalling and reinstaling dirsync or firing up a new virtual machine in order to install dirsync on (my plan B), give the above process a go.

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